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We were trying to make the critique in a balanced way to keep pressure on Hamas—and to not abandon Israel’s just effort to defeat an enemy that attacked it on October 7th, killing twelve hundred people

We'll make no mention of the social murder, excess deaths, and physical murders that have been occurring year over year, inflicted upon Palestinians by Israel (and by extension, the West).

The risk of strengthening Hamas, if Hamas got hold of the fuel or the food, was a serious question. It wasn’t a made-up concern. We never saw it going directly from what the United States was providing. So I want to be clear on that. But they undoubtedly were trying to control the administration of aid because it was a way of holding on to governance.

"Our entirely fictitious concern of strengthening Hamas was more pressing to us than Palestinians starving to death"

Until March of 2025, it wasn’t great, but people were surviving. And it was not an accident. It took constant engagement to keep that flow.

"It definitely isn't our fault, notice how it only started two months after we left (take no notice of the conditions that lead up to this and how we fostered them and also nobody starved to death prior to this no sir)"

I hate the deviousness of "there is food on Gaza" thing that the zionists are doing now, because it's technically true that there is some food in Gaza. The problem is that there is nowhere near enough food to feed everyone, and what food is available is ridiculously expensive and therefore essentially out of reach of the vast majority of people living in Gaza. Like I saw one guy saying recently a can of beef was like 20 bucks a can. So sure technically "there is food in Gaza" but 20 bucks for a can of beef is impossibly expensive.

So they get to hide behind this partial truthism and if you press them on it they can fall back on the usual capitalist bullshit of "well work harder, make more money, move somewhere cheaper, etc etc etc" shit that they genuinely believe applies to everyone all of the time and is in their minds entirely defensible and the conversation just becomes a recursive "there is food and just do capitalism better to eat it or they don't deserve it". It ignores entirely the material conditions of what is happening and who is causing it.

I don't think that it's broadly working as a PR strategy but it is absolutely throwing a wrench into genuine conversations about what genocide looks like and how this absolutely qualifies because it turns the conversation from "Isreal is doing a measured and intentional genocide" to "well maybe they're trying and Palestinians just need to work harder" or some bullshit. I guess theyve always been doing this but it feels like "there is food" is the number one propaganda point that I keep running into now and it's sickening in its measured deviousness

If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?

Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible.

Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?

Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.